Director

She has a difficult personality – but a nice nose! This opinion expressed by a short statured Gaul is just one of the many legends surrounding the captivating pharaoh. Cleopatra's ability to stun the greats of her time has always served as a blessing for those in the entertainment business who had a keen eye for good material. Even though Handel's timeless smash hit bears the title of the Roman dictator, the Egyptian usually leads by a nose in this gem of the operatic repertoire. The way she warbles, charms, suffers, sobs and triumphs is breathtakingly beautiful.

Giulio Cesare in Egitto

Oper Leipzig

On a neglected farm, the animals revolt against their tyrannical owner. After some time, however, they are forced to submit to the yoke of a new leader from their own ranks.

Animal Farm

Vienna State Opera

The next Music Director of the Teatro alla Scala, Myung-Whun Chung, reaches his eleventh opera title at La Scala (having conducted over 140 concerts both at home and on tour) with this new production of Bizet’s Carmen, a co-production with London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and Madrid’s Teatro Real. Well-versed in French music—also through his work with the Opéra Bastille and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France—Chung leads a cast that is perfectly idiomatic. Alongside Clémentine Margaine in the title role, alternating with Stéphanie d’Oustrac, and Giorgi Manoshvili as Escamillo, the production features Vittorio Grigolo as Don José—a major Italian voice with a strong affinity for the French repertoire— alternating with Matthew Polenzani. Damiano Michieletto and set designer Paolo Fantin reduce local colour to a minimum in order to construct a bare and effective spectacle, focused on the ineluctable fate of the protagonists.

EPSG:4326

Carmen

Teatro alla Scala

A coup attempt and his best friend a conspirator – yet Tito would rather relinquish his throne than base his power on fear and terror. "La clemenza di Tito" is a work that poses timeless questions about the use of power, guilt, and forgiveness. Mozart's late opera seria contains some of his most fascinating arias and ensembles. The rising tenor Giovanni Sala sings Tito, while Cecilia Bartoli interprets Sesto, one of her signature roles. The historically informed Orchestra La Scintilla performs under the direction of Gianluca Capuano.

La clemenza di Tito

Opernhaus Zürich

An attempted coup is uncovered, and his best friend is a conspirator – but Tito would rather renounce his office as ruler than base his power on fear and terror. «La clemenza di Tito» is a work that poses timeless questions about how to deal with power, and about guilt and forgiveness. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s late opera seria contains some of his most beautiful arias and ensembles. Conductor Marc Minkowski returns to Opernhaus Zürich with this new production, as does Italian director Damiano Michieletto.

The clemency of Titus

Zurich Opera House

Lohengrin

Teatro La Fenice

Teatro dell'Opera di Roma

La Fille du régiment, or the “regiment’s daughter”, is what they call the young Marie, who was found when just a child on the battlefield by soldiers. The troops commit to raising the evidently abandoned girl themselves. A young man of course must soon enter the scene and stir a special interest in her, and the secret of her origins will soon also be revealed. In the best tradition of French opéra comique, with his team of librettists, Gaetano Donizetti created a piece that in a truly original way combines Alpine idyll, patriotic enthusiasm and romantic love with comic situations and heightened conflicts. While Donizetti’s piece was at times extremely popular, the “regiment’s daughter” faded from favour somewhat in the 20th century. It can now be rediscovered, from the famous overture right through to the both amusing and cryptic music, in its first new production at the Bayerische Staatsoper in almost ninety years.

La Fille du régiment

Max-Joseph-Platz

“If Falstaff got thinner, what would he be?” Sir John Falstaff loves food, wine and women – and urgently needs cash to pay off his debts. Despite his advanced age, he considers himself an irresistible heartthrob and writes two identical love letters to Mrs Alice Ford and Mrs Meg Page in order to get his hands on their husbands’ money. But the two women see through his plan and begin to play him at his own game ...

Falstaff

Semperoper Dresden

Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte from the drama El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra by Tirso de Molina, through the libretto Don Giovanni o sia Il convitato di pietra by Giovanni Bertati for Giuseppe Gazzaniga.

Don Giovanni

Carlo Felice Theater

A silk ladder (La scala di seta) enables Giulia to receive her husband, whom she married against her guardian’s wishes, in her room night after night. The fact that three men end up using the silk ladder is one of the unsavory complications of this comedy. Director Damiano Michieletto presents the six-character work as a fast-paced sitcom, true to Rossini’s motto that the everyday must be exaggerated in order for it to become an opera.

The Silk Ladder

Exactly 200 years ago, Rossini dared to celebrate the coronation of Charles X with this ebullient satire of class, manners, and the timeless misery of long-distance travel. In his long-awaited American debut, Olivier Award-winning director Damiano Michieletto transforms this showpiece into a theatrical work of art, setting the story in a present-day gallery on the cusp of opening a major exhibition. The production’s rich narrative and visual palette shade Rossini’s joyful musical canvas, blurring the line between life and art.

Il viaggio a Reims

Academy of Music

Trapped in an unhappy marriage Káťa is drawn into a passionate affair. As a wild storm brews, she is overwhelmed by her actions. Damiano Michieletto’s raw staging cuts to the heart of Káťa’s guilt and despair as she makes a choice between love and life itself.

Káťa Kabanová

Glyndebourne

Damiano Michieletto’s searing production returns, casting a new light on the lust, violence and passion of Bizet’s ever-popular opera.

Royal Opera House

This impactful opera is an experience unlike anything seen before at the Finnish National Opera. In an uprising on a farm, a group of animals overthrow their farmer’s tyrannical reign. Little by little, their new society begins to mirror human civilisation, and their original principles of equality are cast aside.

Finnish National Opera and Ballet

Juan Diego Flórez leads a fantastic cast in Offenbach's dream-like opera.

Sung in French with English subtitles

Royal Ballet and Opera: The Tales of Hoffman (12A)

Stephen Joseph Theatre

Juan Diego Flórez and Leonardo Caimi lead a fantastic cast in Offenbach's dream-like opera.

The Tales of Hoffmann

Why choose when you can have drama, tragedy and comedy all in one evening? Enjoy Puccini's operatic trilogy in Damiano Michieletto's critically acclaimed and Reumert award-winning production.

Il trittico

Copenhagen Opera House

Can you go too far in protecting your child from the dangers of the world? Verdi's Rigoletto tells the story of a father who imprisons his daughter in an attempt to protect her from his depraved employer, the transgressive womaniser Duke of Mantua. In vain, as it turns out when his daughter ultimately falls in love, is seduced and kidnapped.

Rigoletto

National Opera & Ballet

Il barbiere di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini returns to the Cavea del Teatro, the evocative open-air theater located right on the roof of the Maggio. The opera is conducted by the young maestro Riccardo Bisatti, with the now “traditional” staging by Damiano Michieletto. Twenty-one years after its first production, which took place in July 2005 at the Roman Theatre of Fiesole - and thus originally conceived and designed for an open space, just like the Cavea del Maggio - it reaches its eleventh staging within the Theater’s seasons. Despite its age, it retains intact all the freshness, originality, and modernity that have made it over time an “evergreen” production, highly appreciated by the Maggio. Michieletto’s production features an almost total absence of real sets and focuses all attention on comic gags and carefully crafted gestures. It begins as a train journey, announced over a loudspeaker - an cheerful way of traveling “through” Rossini’s opera, evoking places and situations through imagination. Evocative and eccentric costumes and bright colors turn the characters into caricatures, almost as if they were figures from commedia dell’arte: Don Basilio is green, with long, greasy hair and a hooked nose, entirely green with envy like a snake (or rather, a basilisk); Figaro has hair that suggests fox-like ears and a mustache, while Don Bartolo, dressed all in white, resembles a pot-bellied bulldog who jealously watches Rosina, dressed in red like her lover Lindoro.

Il barbiere di Siviglia

Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Theatre

Cinderella

San Carlo Theatre

Men and women of flesh and blood take centre stage in Cavalleria rusticana as in Pagliacci. Reality becomes theatre and, when the masks come off, theatre becomes reality. In both of these short works, obsessive love and jealousy give rise to violent emotions and passionate musical outbursts. When they brought rural Italy to the opera stage, Pietro Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo inaugurated verismo in music. Director Damiano Michieletto is reprising his 2018 production, which made a lasting impression with its powerful neo-realist transposition to an Italian village in the mid-twentieth century. For her debut at La Monnaie, conductor Alevtina Ioffe promises to bring out the emotional depth of these scores with their unparalleled dramatic force.

Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci

La Monnaie - De Munt

In 1847, Giuseppe Verdi was working on a piece unlike anything ever seen on the opera stage. To turn a dark, blood-soaked Shakespearean tragedy into an Italian opera was already a bold undertaking. But to go even further and create an opera that adhered closely to the character of the original rather than to established operatic forms seemed almost impossible. “I believe the time has come to abandon the usual forms and models,” Verdi wrote. Thus he ventured into the creation of a musical drama exploring psychological abysses amid a whirl of crime, guilt, and punishment, under the imposing English title of the original: Macbeth.

Director

Damiano Michieletto

Events

Upcoming events

Apr 26, 2026 - Mar 21, 2027

La clemenza di Tito · Opernhaus Zürich

8 - 27 Jun, 2026

Carmen · Teatro alla Scala

13 - 27 Jun, 2026

Giulio Cesare in Egitto · Oper Leipzig

11 - 18 Jul, 2026

Il barbiere di Siviglia · Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

20 - 27 Oct, 2026

Cinderella · Teatro di San Carlo

Past events

13 - 27 Jun, 2026

Giulio Cesare in Egitto · Oper Leipzig

12 - 23 Jun, 2026

Animal Farm · Wiener Staatsoper

About

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